The Metatextual and the Hermeneutic in Meatless Days

Two things, in particular, struck me about Sara Suleri's Meatless
Days. The first is the author's attempt to purposely confuse her
readers, to perplex them into a state of suspense. Often, I found myself
rereading a sentence or paragraph over and over again, hoping to find the
symbolic key to its hidden meaning. But, as I read on, I realized that
Suleri had left me with something tantalizingly nonsensical, a riddle she
refused to answer until later in her story. The following passage,
epigrammatic of the novel as a whole, coaxes the reader into a state of
mild, perhaps pleasant, confusion:

It is hard to believe today that I thought the dream too
harsh a thing. As parable, the kapura does not dare to look much
further. It wishes to take the taste of my imagination only quite so far
and, like my mother, makes me trebly entranced; had I really been perplexed
at such a simple thing? Or perhaps my mind had designed me to feel rudely
tender. I had eaten, that was all, and woken to a world of meatless days.
(44)

Suleri's use of the hermeneutic code is both frustrating and engaging.
Is Suleri merely trying to entice her readers to continue, promising
answers to these unsolved mysteries later in her text? Or is she using this
technique for another effect? Suleri's title, Meatless Days, like
all titles I suppose, is itself a hermeneutic code, forcing the reader to
ask, "Why is the book called Meatless Days?" Does Suleri's technique
of withholding information work for you? What are the dangers of this
technique? How and why does Suleri use it?

I was also struck by the many moments in the text where Suleri seems to
describe her own project. The following are examples of this
metatextuality:

When we lived in Pakistan, that little swerve from severity
into celebration happened often. [31]

When I teach topics in third world literature, much time is lost in
trying to explain that the third world is locatable only as a discourse of
convenience. Trying to find it is like pretending that history or home is
real and not located precisely where you're sitting. [20]

I can understand it, the fear that food will not stay discrete but will
instead defy our categories of expectation in what can only be described as
a manner of extreme belligerence. I like order to a plate, and know the
great sense of failure that attends a moment when what is potato to the
fork is turnip to the mouth. It' shard, when such things happen.
[29]

How do these quotes describe what Suleri is doing in Meatless
Days? Do you think I am reading too much into them? Do they really
represent the author's attempt to self-consciously comment on her own
writing?